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Despite repeatedly claiming that a peace deal with Iran is at hand, President Donald Trump is unwilling to finalize one. An agreement would cement the failure of Trump’s regime change war. It would also require recognizing Iran’s sovereign rights, including having an economy free of crushing US sanctions. Trump would also have to halt his Israeli ally’s continued attacks on southern Lebanon, which have killed more than 3,000 people and displaced more than 1.2 million since March. Israeli attacks on Gaza also continue daily, with no protest from Trump or his so-called “Board of Peace.”

Having promised to make a “final determination” on an Iran deal last week, the Trump administration can only stall with more deception. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress this week that “the war is over” even as US-Iran clashes continue and Gulf states absorb Iranian retaliation. Trump meanwhile feigned anger at his ally Benjamin Netanyahu for continuing his annihilation campaign in Lebanon, a clear Iranian red line for a lasting deal. On Monday, the White House fed Axios a story claiming Trump berated his Israeli counterpart “in an expletive-laden call.” The Trump team is copying the playbook honed by their predecessors in the Biden administration, who planted a similar story in the same outlet at least 25 times, according to a tally from media critic Adam Johnson, to mask their support for Netanyahu’s aggression.

Trump, like Biden before him, could simply tell Netanyahu to stop the bombing of Lebanon. Instead, every US action has been geared toward encouraging Israeli aggression. Netanyahu has barely tried to play along with the ruse, even telling CNBC on Wednesday: “We can disagree in the morning, and by the afternoon, we have common action.”

For now, that common action is causing massive civilian destruction in southern Lebanon in the hopes of weakening support for Hezbollah and laying the ground for a civil war. As it has since its founding in 1948, Israel is also carrying out plans to steal as much territory as it can under the guise of security concerns. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared in March that the war on Lebanon “needs to end with a different reality entirely” not only with Hezbollah “but also with the change of Israel’s borders.” These new borders, he added, “must be the Litani [River],” about 15% of Lebanese territory. Hezbollah’s resistance has made this impossible, so Israel has set the more modest goal of committing as much ethnic cleansing as it can.

Washington has backed this campaign not just militarily but diplomatically. On Wednesday, the State Department announced that it had brokered a new “ceasefire” in Lebanon – without the involvement of Hezbollah, the Lebanese force that Israel is fighting. US terms, accepted by the Lebanese government, make the ceasefire entirely “contingent on a complete cessation of Hizbollah fire and the evacuation of all Hizbollah operatives from the South Litani Sector.” It makes no demands on Israel, the occupying military with territorial designs on that region. Before that, Trump’s Treasury Department sanctioned multiple Lebanese government officials for trying to “preserve” Hezbollah’s “influence over key Lebanese state institutions.”

The US and Israel justify these measures by noting that the internationally recognized Lebanese government also wants Hezbollah’s disarmament. While there is a major constituency in Lebanon that would welcome this, an even larger number opposes the decades-long campaign of Israeli aggression and conquest in Lebanon that Hezbollah was founded to resist. And Hezbollah’s “influence” over the government does not just come with its military arsenal but via democracy, in a broader coalition that holds 62 seats in a 128-member parliament. Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a member of the Hezbollah-allied Amal Movement, has guaranteed that Hezbollah would abide by any ceasefire premised on an Israeli withdrawal.

Unwilling to challenge the project of Greater Israel, Trump has reverted to issuing impossible demands and erratic threats. Late last month, Trump declared in a phone call with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan and Turkey that it “should be mandatory” in an Iran peace deal for them to join the Abraham Accords, the Jared Kushner-designed project to normalize regional ties with Israel while ignoring Palestinian rights. Having paid a huge economic price for Trump’s war on Iran, all while witnessing his prioritization of Israel’s security over theirs, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are in no mood to indulge his delusions. Trump has also threatened to bomb and sanction Oman, which angered Washington by maintaining a neutral stance throughout the war after trying, through mediation, to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Unless Trump can change course, he will remain stuck between a regime change war on Iran that he can’t win and a peace deal with Iran that he won’t make. And everyone in the region, above all Iranian, Lebanese, and Palestinian civilians, will be punished for having leaders who refuse illusory “ceasefires” imposed through wars of aggression.

by Dr. Brendan Whelan

The wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine, they say. A recent ruling from the Geneva-based Tribunal of the International Labour Organisation (ILOAT) ordered my former employer the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to reverse its decision to sanction me for alleged breaches of confidentiality and to pay damages. After six years of legal wrangling, the time-worn adage has rung true.

But it isn’t an absolute win or a victory in the true sense. My success at the ILOAT was a correction to a single wrongdoing in the context of a much larger continuing deception being perpetrated by the world’s chemical watchdog and Nobel Peace Laureate.

Neither was it my success. As much as anything, it was a triumph for those who, during the last eight years, have supported the inspectors who challenged the OPCW over its investigation into the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, in April 2018. I was part of that probe, and a witness to how it had been manipulated, ostensibly to serve a pre-ordained conclusion.

I am referring, of course, to people like Ambassador José Bustani, the first director general of the OPCW who has been steadfast in supporting the inspectors in our fight for transparency. And individuals like Dr Piers Robinson, former UN Assistant Secretary-General Hans von Sponeck, and Professor Richard Falk the former UN special rapporteur for Palestine, who, together with Mr. Bustani, as directors of the BerlinGroup21, have been instrumental in advancing the quest for OPCW accountability.

Or journalists like Peter Hitchens, Tucker Carlson, Caitlin Johnstone, and, above all, Aaron Maté of The Grayzone who made the Douma story his and has been doggedly pursuing it for years, and without whom we inspectors would be voiceless. I include members of the Brussels Panel who were the first to take up the mantle of defending the inspectors. And the signatories of the Statement of Concern, like the four former OPCW team leaders, and musician and activist Roger Waters. Even some politicians who protested. Tulsi Gabbard and former Members of the European Parliament, Mick Wallace and Claire Daly, who risked their own re-election prospects by speaking out.

Without these people, who, for their stance, were targeted systematically with smears and ad hominem attacks on their integrity, the OPCW cover-up would have remained the dark secret of those who perpetrated it and those knowledgeable of it but too scared or unwilling to speak out.

Having said that, it should be stressed that the OPCW not only was, but still is an extraordinary body, staffed by consummate professionals who fervently believe in its mission. During the 2013-14 removal of Assad’s chemical weapons from Syria, in the midst of a raging civil war, it was the OPCW at its best, and the Nobel Peace Prize was a fitting tribute to its extraordinary legacy. It is an organisation I am proud to have served for nearly 17 years.

When I call out the OPCW in the context of the Douma scandal, I am referring to a very specific and tiny element within the Organisation that I believe has been coopted to serve the interests of powerful external actors. The sell-out is the machinations of just a few; individuals in key positions, who, for whatever motives, have embroiled this world-class body in a damning controversy through their willingness to even corrupt science itself.

Now finally, as a direct result of a legal case at an international Tribunal, their deceit, in a gratifying nod to poetic justice, has been confirmed, literally through the Organisation’s own admission.

The ILOAT ruling didn’t just vindicate me personally and those who stood behind the inspectors. While the focus of the ILOAT case was my unlawful sanctioning, the drawn-out legal process threw up some unexpected and damning admissions about the Douma probe.

Where years of public demands and outcry barely elicited a response, faced with a formal legal challenge the OPCW outed itself, perhaps inadvertently, by unequivocally confirming before the Tribunal the core allegations of the dissenting inspectors: that critical evidence in the Douma investigation was withheld; that the Organisation unfairly targeted dissenting inspectors with spurious claims of breaching confidentiality; and that management sidelined inspectors and refused to engage with them over their concerns.

The first two confirmations are now public. Now for the third.

Sounding the Alarm

On 1 March 2019, six months after I’d departed the organisation, the final report—concluding there were reasonable grounds to believe there had been a chlorine gas attack in Douma—was published by the OPCW. But—as has been widely reported—it lacked some critical findings.

I wrote to the OPCW Director-General (DG), Ambassador Fernando Arias, to express ‘some major concerns’ about the report. Specifically, I highlighted the omission of the expert opinion of German toxicologists who had ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death of more than 40 victims, as well as the excision of the fact that the levels of chlorinated chemicals (trichlorophenols) in environmental samples from the alleged crime scene were no different to what would be expected in the natural environment. Had this evidence been included, it would have turned around the conclusions of the Douma report.

Arias had not been the Director-General during much of the Douma investigation and I suspected he might have been kept in the dark about the attempts to censure and manipulate the initial report. ‘I fear you may not be aware of the details of what has been going on in the FFM and I am duty-bound to enlighten you on the facts’ I wrote Arias in March 2019. I protested that the final report had ‘shockingly omitted’ the German toxicologists’ findings. My letter, however, was not to challenge whether a chemical attack in Douma had necessarily happened or not. It was to call out the impropriety and scientific bias in the investigation into that allegation.

There was no reaction or even acknowledgement from the OPCW chief.

In April, I contacted a senior OPCW director to enlist her help in trying to get a private meeting with Arias. I even offered to fly to The Netherlands. But it was a no go. According to the OPCW Chief of Cabinet (CoC), an audience with the DG would be problematic. Because of protocols, I was told.

Instead, I could write again and mail the letter to the OPCW. And depending on the content, the CoC might consider allowing me a ‘possible’ meeting with the Director-General.

In other words, just to gain access to the DG, I would first have to be vetted by someone who had been the French representative to the OPCW at the time France joined the US in launching missiles on Syria in reprisal for the alleged Douma chemical attack. Facilitating an audience with the DG to express concern about a report that the belligerents saw as legitimizing those attacks, arguably presented an important conflict of interest.

Again, there was no reply from the Director-General.

The following month an engineering study of two industrial chlorine gas cylinders, which contradicted the official findings of the Douma report, was leaked from inside the OPCW. In response, the Director-General initiated a major inquiry.

A meeting with Arias was now more relevant than ever. Tired of being given what seemed like the proverbial run-around, I wrote to the senior director and demanded to speak with the DG “even if protocols have to be side-stepped or even trampled on.” Still no response, but I did get a letter from the Director-General on 7 June.

His vague and blithe response addressed none of the concerns I had raised. It did, however, make what appeared to be a veiled warning against any public revelations. ‘I take this opportunity to remind you of the obligations you undertook when you signed your secrecy agreement with the OPCW. I trust you will fulfill them,’ Arias replied.

Peer support

Despite Arias’ brushoff, given how senior OPCW aides had appeared to be shielding him from engaging directly with me, I wasn’t convinced he wasn’t being insulated from inconvenient facts by his close aides. I made, therefore, a last-ditch effort to get my concerns to him about the suppressed toxicology by other means.

I wrote an email to two senior OPCW colleagues who had been to Germany with me in June 2018 to meet the toxicologists. As scientists, they’d have the same concerns about the suppression of critical evidence. ‘I believe it is our professional and moral obligation to ensure the DG appreciates the gravity of the matter,’ I wrote.

‘[Do] not engage with this person’

The two officials forwarded the email to the CoC and got a reply that was disturbingly telling. I have only since learned of it because the OPCW submitted this correspondence to the Tribunal as part of its defense. ‘DG’s instructions are to not engage with this person,’ the CoC cautioned the two members of staff.

Moreover, my audacious ‘attempt of communication’ with the DG would, he said, be dealt with ‘at the appropriate level.’

And I was dealt with ‘appropriately’. That same day, I was notified that I was a suspect in the leaking of the engineering assessment to the internet, despite having parted with the organisation eight months earlier. Six months later, I was sanctioned by the Director-General for having supposedly contributed to the unauthorised leak and was barred for life from returning to the OPCW.

Framing my attempt to communicate with him as some kind of sinister ploy, in a briefing to OPCW Member States to report the findings of the leak investigation, the Director-General told international delegates that, ‘‘As late as August 2019, almost a year after he left the Organisation, Inspector B (me) contacted members of the Organisation to attempt to convince them to join his campaign to challenge the final Douma report.’’

Attack is the worst form of defense

When I challenged the sanction at the ILOAT, the portrayal—with falsehoods and disingenuous personal attacks—of me as a self-serving persistent nuisance to the Douma investigation became a core part of the OPCW’s defensive strategy.

‘In mid-July 2018, during the Executive Council Session of the OPCW … States Parties submitted questions to the Team Leader [about the Douma Interim Report]’, the OPCW told the Tribunal. ‘While the Team Leader was preparing responses to these questions, the Appellant came to the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] offices every day demanding access to the States Parties’ questions and the Team Leader’s responses to those questions. The Team Leader did not give the Appellant access to the questions or his answers, as the Appellant had completed his hand-over of all materials relating to the Douma incident on 12 July 2018.’

The claim is a gross exaggeration: in reality, I made a single request to see the document. Moreover, as a team member and lead author of the interim report that States Parties were asking about, it was my right and obligation to know and participate in responding to those questions.

The OPCW’s attempt to justify my exclusion by implying I was no longer a member of the investigation team because I had ‘completed my hand-over … on 12 July 2018,’ (conveniently just days before the questions were submitted) relied on a false premise. I was still part of the investigation team at the time. The Director-General’s own response confirms that. ‘You remained part of the team until you completed the handover of the confidential material by 3 August 2018,’ the OPCW chief wrote me in his June 2019 letter.

All of this, therefore, serves to prove beyond doubt that the OPCW not only refused to engage with inspectors who challenged the integrity of the investigation after the publication of the final Douma Report, but was silencing dissent by sidelining them while they were still officially part of the investigation team.

In this light, the DG’s affirmation in his briefing to Member States rings pretty hollow. ‘The Secretariat always takes into account all information submitted and views exchanged,’ he told delegates. ‘The Douma investigation was no exception.’ Unless, of course, it’s a critical toxicological finding from German military experts or the views of dissenting inspectors.

Rising from the ashes

The ILOAT case has brought closure to the OPCW affair for me personally and an end to a long and often difficult process. But others will go on. BerlinGroup 21, will, no doubt, continue to seek accountability from the OPCW inside the corridors of power of the UN and national governments until José Bustani’s vision is fulfilled. “My hope is that the [O]rganisation can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be,” he said on behalf of the Brussels Panel.

We all share his hope.

Dr. Brendan Whelan, an organic chemist, served two stints at the Organisation for the Prohibition for Chemical Weapons (OPCW) over more than 16 years. In 2018, he went to Syria as part of the Advance Team to investigate the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma. He was responsible for the scientific planning and coordination of the mission, and was the chief author of the team’s investigation report.

Another speaker, Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, threatened to pressure the event’s corporate sponsors into pulling out if we were allowed to appear. According to one source who spoke to Max, Zelenska “and the highest levels of the Ukrainian government” threatened to “yank the whole tablecloth off of the table and break everything.”

This was months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the propaganda campaign behind the NATO strategy of using Ukraine to bleed Russia, and Zelensky’s star power for going along with it, were at peak levels. Two niche, dissenting journalists who challenged the underlying narratives of this proxy war were therefore deemed to be non-grata.

But propaganda campaigns built around jingoism and conformity have a hard time sustaining themselves over the long-term. Proxy war fatigue has set in; the US under Trump has moved on to regime change war in Iran; and more facts have emerged to corroborate the arguments that Max and I have long made. So nearly four years later, I was happy to return to Web Summit this week to discuss these themes and more.

Two videos are below: the first an interview with the outlet Coastal Front (audio also included above), and the second a panel I did with author Chris Hedges, moderated by Sharon Nadeem.

Interview on smear tactics, Ukraine, and OPCW cover-up scandal (w/ Reid Small of Coastal Front)

Panel with Chris Hedges “International law and disorder: the crisis of justice” (moderated by Sharon Nadeem)

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For the first time in a prolonged cover-up scandal, the world’s top chemical watchdog has acknowledged censoring a finding that undermined allegations of a toxic gas attack by the former Syrian government.

According to previously leaked documents, expert German military toxicologists consulted by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death of dozens of victims in an alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma in April 2018. The experts even raised the possibility that the incident was a false flag. The OPCW suppressed this finding and released a final report asserting that chlorine gas was likely used. The OPCW’s conclusion aligned with the claims of the US, UK, and France, who bombed Syria in April 2018 over what they alleged was a Syrian government chemical attack in Douma.

After years of stonewalling, the OPCW has admitted that the Germans’ input, along with the fact that they were even consulted, was concealed.

The concession came during a legal battle with Dr. Brendan Whelan, a veteran OPCW inspector and senior member of the team that deployed to Syria for the Douma mission. Whelan and another Douma team member, Ian Henderson, raised concerns about the manipulation of the investigation’s findings.

After their complaints became public, the OPCW leadership publicly disparaged the two dissenting inspectors and penalized them for alleged breaches of confidentiality. Whelan successfully challenged his censure before the Geneva-based Tribunal of the International Labour Organisation (ILOAT), which recently awarded him damages and instructed the OPCW to withdraw its impugned decision.

One of the allegations against Whelan was that he improperly sent two letters in March and April 2019 to Fernando Arias, the OPCW Director-General, raising concerns about unethical conduct in the Douma investigation. In trying to make its case against Whelan, the OPCW inadvertently admitted to the censorship that he had challenged. In his letters to Arias, the OPCW complained, Whelan included “specific and detailed information gathered by FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] investigators from toxicology experts. This information, classified as OPCW Highly Protected, was not included in the Final Report which was publicly released.”

The OPCW’s confirmation that it excluded the toxicologists’ “Highly Protected” information from the publicly released Final Report confirms one of Whelan’s key grievances.

“Critical information, like the expert opinions of the toxicologists... has, shockingly, been omitted,” Whelan wrote in his April 2019 letter. “There is even no record in the report of those consultations... To say that this selective use of expert opinions and facts is disturbing is an understatement.”

Whelan protested the omission of the German toxicologists’ input because of its profound implications. In public statements after the Douma incident, experts had already raised doubts that chlorine caused the deaths in Douma. But the German military toxicologists, who were consulted by the OPCW in June 2018, were more definite. The Germans told the OPCW that the circumstances of the fatalities – apparent immediate death and collapse in piles at the center of two rooms, a failure to escape, and rapid profuse foaming at the mouth and nose – were inconsistent with chlorine poisoning. According to the then-head of the OPCW Laboratory, the experts even raised “the possibility of a staged attack” in Douma because “the circumstances of death for the victims do not match chlorine.”

While the Douma victims’ signs of rapid foaming are not consistent with exposure to chlorine gas, they are consistent with nerve agent exposure. But by that point, the OPCW’s chemical analysis had ruled out a sarin or any other nerve agent bomb as the killer because none of these chemicals, or any toxic chemicals for that matter, were found at the scene or in biomedical samples.

If the rapid and profuse frothing was not the result of a nerve agent or chlorine gas attack, the possibility existed that there was no chemical attack at all – and that insurgents staged the incident to frame the Syrian government. In this case, the OPCW would be dealing with a faked chemical attack that triggered US-led airstrikes on Syria, and the unexplained deaths of more than 40 men, women, and children.

The Germans’ assessment was included in the Douma team’s initial report, which Whelan authored with the help of fellow experts and, after peer approval including the team leader, prepared for publication in June 2018. But senior OPCW officials subverted that document and tried to rush out a replacement, doctored version that falsely claimed evidence of chemical weapons use. Whelan thwarted the release of the bogus substitute only after discovering it at the last minute and sending an email of protest. But when the final report was released in March 2019, after Whelan had departed the Organisation, the OPCW again excluded any mention of the Germans’ expert opinions, or even that they had been consulted. Instead, the report claimed that there were “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine [chlorine gas].” Had the Germans’ findings been published, they would have explicitly contradicted this conclusion.

In an August 2019 email, Whelan asked two OPCW officials who had accompanied him to Germany if they would join him in raising concerns about the suppression of the toxicologists’ findings. “At a minimum a satisfactory explanation has to be provided,” Whelan wrote. But the OPCW has never offered a rebuttal to the initial toxicology assessment, nor an explanation for why it was concealed.

Another OPCW report on the Douma incident, released in January 2023 by the organization’s Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), claimed to have consulted with a different, unidentified toxicologist and asserted that the “symptoms of the victims are, overall, consistent with exposure to chlorine gas in very high concentrations.”

But as I reported at the time, and discussed in a presentation to the United Nations, the IIT report limited the toxicologist’s scope of assessment to just the “accounts” of a cherry-picked selection of alleged witnesses. Moreover, the IIT’s toxicologist failed to address the frothing seen on dead victims in the videos in Douma, as well as the Germans’ assessment that this was inconsistent with exposure to chlorine gas. To date, no recognized toxicologist has gone on record to state that the Douma victims’ visible symptoms and reported rapid deaths are consistent with chlorine gas exposure.

In the halls of power, the IIT’s report was treated as a vindication of the chemical attack allegation in Douma, which was integral to the broader US-led regime change campaign that toppled the government of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. The State Department and its British, French, and German counterparts hailed the IIT’s findings and touted what they called “the independent, unbiased, and expert work of the OPCW staff.”

Establishment media followed suit. Major outlets – including the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post – approvingly covered the IIT report while omitting any mention of the OPCW’s Douma cover-up controversy. In an illustrative act of denialism, the Post ignored the dissenting inspectors and reduced skepticism of the official narrative to “a disinformation campaign by the Russian state and a number of high-profile online activists.” These voices, the Post falsely added, even claimed that “children seen foaming at the mouth were faking their symptoms.”

In reality, the fakery came with the censorship of expert German toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of those symptoms and casualties. As a direct consequence of Whelan taking legal action, the OPCW has finally admitted that it suppressed this critical information in the still-unresolved probe into how dozens of people in Douma lost their lives.

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[Note: When veteran inspector Dr. Brendan Whelan challenged the manipulation of a probe into an alleged April 2018 chemical weapons attack in the Syrian city of Douma, the leadership of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) publicly disparaged and censured him. After a lengthy arbitration case, the OPCW has been ordered to reverse its decision and pay Dr. Whelan moral damages and legal costs. For the first time, Dr. Whelan tells the story of his years-long, Orwellian ordeal for justice. -Aaron Maté]

by Dr. Brendan Whelan

In Kafka’s distressing work of fiction, The Trial, Joseph K, a bank clerk with an unremarkable life finds himself accused by a faceless, totalitarian authority of a crime he did not commit; a crime that was not revealed to him. On the eve of his 31^th birthday K was taken to a quarry and executed, ‘like a dog,’ still ignorant of the charges against him.

I have had my own Kafkaesque ‘trial’ moment, albeit, without the fiendish consequences that befell Kafka’s antihero. Mine wasn’t at the hands of some authoritative regime or even a corrupt local prosecutor. My accuser, sentencer and executioner was my employer, the Organisation for the Prohibition for Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a Nobel Peace Laureate and the world’s watchdog for the planet’s most deadly chemical warfare agents.

The Right to Know

My ordeal began in 2019 when an engineering study of two industrial chlorine gas cylinders, purportedly dropped from a helicopter in an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, in April 2018, was leaked from inside the OPCW. The unauthorized release contradicted the findings of the OPCW’s official Douma Report of March 2019, which concluded there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ a chemical attack had occurred. The report, according to the US Department of State, vindicated the reprisal missile attacks launched against Syria at the behest of US President Donald Trump before OPCW inspectors could enter Douma to investigate.

In response to the embarrassing leak, the OPCW Director-General instigated a major inquiry. Two OPCW inspectors involved in the Douma probe were in the crosshairs. I was one of them.

I was told by the OPCW that ‘Information ha[d] come to light indicating that [I] may have been involved in the breach,’ and despite having left the Organisation some eight months before the leak, that I was a suspect.

I asked, repeatedly, to be told the precise allegations against me; a right not only enshrined in law but in the Organisation’s protocols. They refused to elaborate or specify any charges. At that point I ended any collaboration with an investigation that was contemptuous of the requirements for due process. The investigation proceeded regardless.

The Show Trial

On 6 February 2020, the OPCW took the unprecedented step of publicly broadcasting its findings. Again, in breach of their obligations, they refused me a copy of the Full Investigation Report, which would, or should, have specified the allegations against me and the evidence to support them. Before a congregation of ambassadors and delegates from Member States of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the OPCW Director-General—in what the veteran British journalist, Peter Hitchens, described as a Show Trial– staged an overtly political and often defamatory briefing.

The official investigation report, for lack of evidence, had formally exonerated Inspectors A and B (as my colleague and I were referred to respectively) from leaking the sensitive document. Yet the Director-General was adamant that we were, nonetheless, not blameless. According to him, I had ‘deliberately and in premeditated’ fashion enabled the leak by failing to comply with the ‘specified procedures for the handling of confidential information so as to create a clear risk of unauthorised disclosure.’ This risk, he said, ‘materialised with the publication of [the] assessment on the [internet].’ Notably, he didn’t explain what the purported infraction was or how it could have led to the leaking of the engineering assessment.

A Deceptive Cover-story

By simultaneously clearing me for the leak while still impugning me over it, the Director-General laid bare his real motive.

It was no coincidence that I and my colleague—the only individuals investigated for the leak—had protested against bias and malpractice in the conduct of the OPCW’s Douma investigation, and, in my case, had been sidelined from the investigation for doing so. The OPCW had refused to address our concerns, which had since become a public controversy. The aim of the leak inquiry, therefore, was to attack our credibility without having to refute our scientific arguments.

‘Firstly, Inspectors A and B are not whistle-blowers,’ the OPCW Chief declared. ‘They are individuals who could not accept that their views were not backed by evidence. When their view could not gain traction, they took matters into their own hands and committed a breach of their obligations to the Organisation… As could be expected, their conclusions are erroneous, uninformed, and wrong.’

I, for my ‘wrongdoing,’ was issued with a letter of censure and a lifetime ban from future employment with the Organisation I had served diligently for seventeen years.

As the legacy media had been heavily invested in maintaining the Western line that Syrian forces had used chemical weapons in Douma, the OPCW’s ad hominem attacks on the two dissenting inspectors were treated as a vindication of the official narrative.

Reducing valid concerns about a cover-up scandal to a Russian disinformation campaign, the Guardian declared that: ‘Inquiry strikes blow to Russian denials of Syria chemical attack.’ Reuters spun their own fictional version of the findings, with a piece erroneously headlined ‘Chemical weapons agency employees leaked information, inquiry finds.’ Bellingcat, a NATO state-funded group that promoted its sponsors’ Douma allegations, declared that the investigation had laid to rest the OPCW cover-up scandal once and for all. ‘It is fitting that the last word on this subject should go to Mr Fernando Arias, the Director-General of the OPCW,’ Bellingcat wrote.

As it turned out, it wouldn’t.

Pushback

I wasn’t prepared to let this egregious attack on my person and my work go unopposed. I took the case to the Administrative Tribunal of the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation (ILOAT), the only legal recourse available to staff of global organisations. There, I challenged the OPCW to be specific about the charges against me and to present the evidence.

The OPCW did respond to the Tribunal. But it was a response that brought an unexpected and bizarre twist.

The Organisation casually abandoned the vague charges they’d made publicly and argued that I had not been sanctioned for anything related to the leaked engineering assessment. The narrative that I’d somehow enabled the leaking of the engineering assessment was now being swapped out for an entirely new account of how I’d supposedly breached my confidentiality obligations.

New Allegations

It was well known inside the Organisation that in June 2018 I’d sent the Chief of Cabinet an email to protest the suppression of the team’s Douma report and a secretive attempt to publish a doctored version. The Chief of Cabinet replied, denying any involvement and agreed to postpone publication. I forwarded his reply (containing my original protest email) to a senior Director with whom I’d expressed concerns the previous day about the conduct of the Douma investigation.

This was now my apparent crime. ‘The Appellant forwarded an email exchange between himself and the former Chief of Cabinet to Director-OSP which contained specific and detailed information about evidence gathered by the FFM [Fact-Finding mission] investigators in Douma,’ the OPCW told the Tribunal.

The ‘specific and detailed information’ they were referring to was a statement in my email to the Chief of Cabinet protesting the fact that the doctored report made the unsupported claim that ‘the team had sufficient evidence to determine that chlorine was released from two cylinders.’ This statement, despite being without basis, was ‘highly protected’, they said, and shouldn’t have been shared with the senior director. They said ‘The D-OSP was not part of the FFM investigation and therefore did not have a need- to-know.’

In other words, by informing the Director of Office of Special Projects of a phoney claim that had been fraudulently inserted into the team’s Douma report, I was committing a ‘serious breach of confidentiality.’ It is worth noting that, because it was challenged, this unfounded assertion was omitted from the final Douma report.

The fresh allegations didn’t end there. Sharing concerns directly with the Director-General was also criminalised. ‘On 25 March, the Appellant wrote a letter to the Director-General, challenging the findings in the Final Report on the Douma incident,’ the Tribunal was told. ‘[T]his letter, which the Appellant admits to sending, contained specific and detailed information gathered by FFM investigators from toxicology experts. In creating and disseminating this letter, he failed to comply with the specified procedures for the handling, protection, release, and dissemination of confidential information so as to create a clear risk of unauthorised disclosure.’

The confidential information I’d supposedly failed to adequately protect in this case referred to an official visit I and other OPCW experts made to Germany in June 2018 to seek the expert opinion of some of the world’s most renowned toxicologists regarding chemical warfare agents. These specialists had ruled out any possibility that the victims of the Douma incident were killed by chlorine gas, thereby lending significant weight to the prospect the attack might have been staged. This expert opinion was suppressed by the OPCW in its final Douma report, and had been a key concern I’d shared in my letter to the Director-General. Sending this letter to the head of the OPCW was a breach of my confidentiality obligations, they told the Tribunal.

What was also significant about this new allegation was that it was the first time management has officially acknowledged this meeting with the German toxicologists. Even mention of it was excluded from the inspection timelines in official reports. By extension, it was the first tacit admission that this crucial piece of evidence was censored from the Douma investigation.

The only rational explanation for all this bait-and-switch was that the OPCW couldn’t defend sanctioning me for supposedly enabling the engineering leak (because I didn’t). But rather than acknowledge the mistake, fresh spurious allegations were conjured up to broadly fit the fuzzy narrative of my guilt, and they proceeded as if these had always been the allegations.

Thought Crimes

If this about-turn in the allegations against me reeked of desperation, the newfound justification for the severity of the sanction meted out is disturbing.

My lifetime baring from future employment for forwarding an unclassified internal email thread to a senior Director was merited, they assured the Tribunal. ‘The effect of the breach of confidentiality was assessed as detrimental to the Organisation,’ because ‘[I’d] sowed discord within the Organisation.’ By sharing information “within the Secretariat [emphasis added] [I]caused a staff member to call into question the integrity of the Organisation’s findings in Douma.’

I had, it seems, gotten inside the mind of a senior OPCW Director. It could hardly get more Orwellian.

Vindication

Following a protracted legal process lasting six years, the Tribunal issued its ruling:

‘‘No disciplinary proceedings may be instituted against a staff member unless he or she had been notified of the allegations against him or her, as well as the right to seek assistance in his or her defence, as well as be given a reasonable opportunity to respond to those allegations. These steps were not taken [by] the Director-General [t]o the extent that the complainant was not provided with the charges [emphasis added] … The violation of the complainant’s due process in the disciplinary process was a manifest error.”

The Tribunal also faulted the OPCW for having “not provided [me] with a copy of the full investigation report.” Tellingly, despite claiming all the evidence for their new allegations was contained in this full investigation report, neither would they provide it to the Tribunal despite my challenge to them to do so.

After a lengthy struggle, I’d finally been vindicated. Personally, and professionally. The sanction had to be lifted. I could work again for the OPCW; an unlikely prospect, but at least possible. And they were ordered to pay substantial moral damages and legal costs. Now, they just need to take down from their website the offending report impugning me. And hopefully, Reuters, The Guardian, and others who parroted the OPCW’s falsehoods about a dissenting inspector will correct their errors.

Dr. Brendan Whelan, an organic chemist, served two stints at the Organisation for the Prohibition for Chemical Weapons (OPCW) over more than 16 years. In 2018, he went to Syria as part of the Advance Team to investigate the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma. He was responsible for the scientific planning and coordination of the mission, and was the chief author of the team’s investigation report.

President Trump has not achieved regime change in Tehran, nor its surrender to his ultimatum of abandoning nuclear enrichment. With the bombing phase of an unpopular war waged jointly with Israel on pause, Trump is settling on a third, familiar objective: strangling Iran’s economy long-term.

Trump has reportedly instructed aides to prepare for a prolonged naval blockade of Iran. Trump insists that his goal is to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. But it was Trump who tore up the 2015 pact that blocked a path to a bomb, and then shunned Iran’s acceptance of even stricter limits during February’s Omani-brokered talks in Geneva. Therefore, his stated objection to Iranian “nuclear weapons” is a euphemism for Iran having any nuclear program, even for peaceful purposes. As the Wall Street Journal put it, Trump “wants to tighten the grip on the regime until it caves to his key demand: dismantling all of Iran’s nuclear work.” For an Iranian government that developed its enrichment program with heavy investment and sacrifice, that is akin to dismantling its sovereignty.

From the president’s perspective, the other problem with reaching an agreement is that it would formalize the failure of his regime change campaign. For that reason, Iran’s latest proposal – to end the US blockade, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and delay nuclear talks until later – is a non-starter. As one US official explained, “accepting it could appear to deny Mr. Trump a victory.” Or as Eric Brewer, a former senior intelligence analyst for Iran under both Obama and Trump, observed: “Why would you accept the Iranian deal while you are still waiting to see if you can cause some serious economic problems to Iran through this bet on the blockade?” The bet has favorable odds. The US-Israeli bombing campaign has devastated vital Iranian industries, caused massive job losses, and raised food prices. The US blockade is reducing oil exports, Iran’s main source of revenue. The cost of reconstruction, according to one estimate, is at least $270 billion.

Trump’s desired economic strangulation of Iran has the added benefit of being Beltway convention wisdom. Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, could have returned to the Iran nuclear deal that members of his cabinet negotiated under Barack Obama. Instead, as a senior Biden official recalls in Enduring Hostility, a newly published account of US policy toward Iran: “at first we were dragging our feet . . . frankly, the President [Biden] wasn’t into his own policy.”

Indeed, Biden and many of his senior aides were more into Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure.” One of those officials, Richard Nephew, who served as Biden’s Deputy Special Envoy for Iran, remains a steadfast supporter. Nephew opposes a grand bargain with Iran even if it could somehow address all of the United States’ stated grievances. “Any deal that affords Iran widespread sanctions relief—even if it features hard limits on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, missile programs, and support for proxies,” Nephew writes, could give the Iranian government “a new lease on life.” Therefore, diplomacy must be opposed. Trump should only seek a “modest” deal that reopens the Strait of Hormuz while “maintaining intense pressure on the Iranian system,” with the ultimate aim “to get actual regime change.”

Nephew is especially opposed to a peace deal because, he admits, US sanctions are the main source of Iran’s problems, and therefore the main engine of his desired regime change. If the US offers “comprehensive sanctions relief for Iran,” he writes, that “would help flood the country with enough money to overcome its legacy of mismanagement, corruption, and failed governance.” If the US lets Iran access enough money to resolve its problems, that in turn “might relieve popular pressure on the regime.” Better then to let Iran’s population suffer under US sanctions and blockades, and never mind the ripple effects on the global economy.

As for why it’s worth immiserating the people of Iran in the hopes of one day overthrowing their leadership, Nephew is equally blunt. Sure, Iranian leaders “seem keen on reaching a broader peace settlement,” but that is not enough. Unfortunately, “there is no proof whatsoever that they are willing to fundamentally change the character of their government.” Specifically, as the past few months have shown, “they are all determined to defeat the United States and strengthen the Islamic Republic.” For operating under the belief that they can resist an unprovoked war of aggression, this means that they “are every bit as extreme as their predecessors.”

Alternatively, the extremists are those in Washington – under Trump, Biden, and now Trump once again – who support impoverishing the people of Iran simply because their government defends itself. Another top Biden official, Amos Hochstein, recently acknowledged that he supported Trump’s first bombing of Iran last June, and that a second-term Biden presidency would have likely done the same.

The bipartisan consensus around regime change and economic strangulation in Iran evokes an observation by Henry Precht, a former State Dept. Director for Iranian Affairs, nearly 40 years ago. “The American consensus on Iran is persistent and clear,” Precht wrote in 1988. “The leaders in Tehran are crazy, blindly ideological, resistant to international law and opinion, and virtually impossible to deal with.” In reality, he added, “the immediate agenda of the Islamic Republic’s leaders is political and economic independence at home, not dominion abroad.”

Because US leaders from both parties are united behind dominion abroad, Iran must therefore be denied economic survival. Even if Trump does not resume bombing Iran, there is little opposition to the traditional policy of making its people suffer.

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After returning from talks with Iranian counterparts in Islamabad, Vice President JD Vance said this week that the Trump administration is offering Tehran a “grand bargain”: “If you guys commit to not having a nuclear weapon, we are going to make Iran economically thrive.”

If this were actually Trump’s offer, there would be nothing left to discuss. In the 2015 JCPOA, and multiple occasions since, the Iranian government has reaffirmed that it will never “seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” Trump’s response was to shred the pact and impose “maximum pressure” sanctions designed to crush Iran’s economy. This economic warfare, continued by the Biden team in the interregnum, culminated in the current round of US-Israeli aggression that has killed thousands, left hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, pushed millions of Iranians into poverty, and also caused widespread carnage in Lebanon.

Vance gave a more honest summation of the US position a few days earlier when he ended the talks in Pakistan: “We just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms.” Indeed, the Iranians held the US to Trump’s stated position for accepting the ceasefire, when he called Iran’s 10-point plan “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” Instead, his designated envoy Vance – flanked by serial diplomacy saboteurs Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff – simply reformulated the same terms for capitulation. Among them, that Iran abandons both peaceful nuclear enrichment and its support for regional groups that resist US-Israeli dominance.

For a Tehran government that has so far staved off, at great cost, a US-Israeli military campaign to impose those goals via regime change and Trump’s genocidal threats of ending Iranian civilization, these are non-starters. “The main problem here is that the Americans very mistakenly have been thinking that they have won the war,” a senior Iranian official told me. “So they are going to dictate their will at the negotiation table instead of a deal, which is normally based on a give and take.” If the US insists on extracting a surrender from Iran which “they couldn’t during the war, it is not going to happen.”

The Trump administration was forced to enter negotiations after Iran struck US military assets in the region and hindered the global economy by limiting naval passage in the Strait of Hormuz. According to Vance, Iran’s response amounts to “economic terrorism.” In reality, Iran is using its leverage over the Strait to end a campaign of US-Israeli terror, all while charging tolls to fund reconstruction.

Trump has responded with a naval blockade of his own, deploying US warships to intercept vessels that enter or exit Iranian ports. But Iran is not completely boxed in. It will try to evade the US siege through land-based shipping routes, all while Trump faces mounting global pressure over his disruption to global supply chains and energy markets. Iran has also threatened to counter Trump by expanding its blockade of the Strait to the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman, and the Red Sea.

Media accounts of the ongoing negotiations are focused on the issue of uranium enrichment, with both sides offering timelines for the duration of a potential curb on Iran’s nuclear program. Yet as Vance’s disingenuous “grand bargain” underscores, uranium enrichment is ultimately not the issue. At the last round of talks in Geneva, Iran addressed the White House’s professed concerns, ruling out any stockpiling of uranium and thereby closing off any potential path to a bomb.

Iranian flexibility was newly confirmed in the New York Times’ insider account of how Trump went to war. After meeting their Iranian counterparts in Geneva, Kushner and Witkoff reported to the president that they “could probably negotiate something, but it would take months,” and maybe even “a lot” of effort. A months-long timeline would be a lost faster than the JCPOA, which took nearly two years to finalize before Trump tore it up. Because Trump, yet again, had no patience for diplomacy, he launched a war of aggression instead.

The chief obstacle to a grand bargain is Washington’s unfettered support to the main source of all instability in West Asia: Israeli aggression. Just as the ceasefire came into effect last week, Israel launched a new wave of violence in Lebanon that has killed hundreds of civilians, destroyed thousands of homes, and forced over 1.2 million to flee. Israel was aiming to provoke a response from Iran in defense of its ally Hezbollah, thereby undermining the ceasefire and cajoling Trump to resume the regime change war that Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied him to undertake. Iran instead insisted on respecting Lebanon’s inclusion in the ceasefire, which has helped compel Trump to announce a 10-day ceasefire in Lebanon earlier today.

Trump says he plans to host additional talks between the Israeli and Lebanese governments. The US will try to compel the pliant Lebanese president Joseph Aoun to reject any linkage with Iran, which could free up Israel to continue terrorizing the Lebanese people and trying to wipe out Hezbollah. While there is indeed a major split inside Lebanon over Hezbollah’s militant activities, a vast majority opposes any normalization with Israel, whose leadership openly fantasizes about expanding “Greater Israel” up to the Litani River. Hezbollah is the only force inside Lebanon that can repel Israel’s colonial designs.

Because the Trump administration won’t constrain Israeli expansionism, it won’t acknowledge that the Iranians have long offered a grand bargain to resolve all of these flashpoints. As far back as 2003, the Iranian government floated a sweeping agreement with the US to limit its nuclear program, cooperate against “terrorism”, end “material support” to Palestinian militant groups, and help convert Hezbollah into a strictly “political organization” inside Lebanon. In exchange, Iran wanted respect for its sovereignty, an end to all sanctions, and US-Israeli acceptance of the Saudi peace initiative, which would grant Palestinians a state within the 1967 borders.

According to then-senior State Department official and longtime Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, the Bush administration shunned the Iranian proposal because “the bias was toward a policy of regime change.” Subsequent administrations have ignored similar overtures. This includes a December 2017 declaration from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, endorsed by Iran and Hamas, calling for a “two-state solution with East Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine” alongside a just resolution for Palestinian refugees.

Rather than accept the latter, which happens to reflect the consensus of virtually every other state on earth, US-Israeli leaders maintain a status quo of occupation, ethnic cleansing, land theft, and regime change. Because Iran anchors a regional grouping that resists this agenda, the grand bargain that it offered the US more than two decades ago remains a non-starter in Washington. Under this posture, Trump will be limited to walking away and leaving Iranians to rebuild, under crippling sanctions, from the latest wreckage that the president and his Israeli partner have gleefully caused.

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In a national address on the Iran war Wednesday night, President Trump offered no exit plan beyond claiming that US “military objectives”, which have changed as much as his conflicting rationales for starting the conflict, will be achieved “very shortly.” The main objective, he made clear, is to escalate joint US-Israeli bombings of Iran’s civilian infrastructure. “Over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said, “we are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

True to his word -- and to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s earlier promise of “death and destruction from the sky, all day long,” – the US and Israel followed up with a new round of war crimes. The latest US-Israeli strikes include an under-construction bridge linking Tehran to the western city of Karaj, built to ease traffic for millions; residential buildings; steel factories; pharmaceutical plants; universities; and the storied Pasteur Institute, a century-old center for health research.

After claiming two days earlier that he had made “great progress” in talks with the Iranian leadership, Trump made no mention of it, presumably because such progress, and the talks themselves, are another presidential fiction. He instead reiterated that the bombing spree is aimed at forcing Iran to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Unless Iran relents, he said, the US will destroy “each and every one of their electric generating plants,” which will be hit “very hard.” Welcoming Trump’s threat, Sen. Lindsey Graham summarized it as follows: “You either do a deal where you get out of the business you’re in, or we’re going to blow your stuff up — the things that will allow you to function as a nation. That is your choice.”

By Iran’s impermissible “business”, Graham means possessing the capacity to defend itself and supporting regional allies like Hezbollah and Yemen’s Ansar Allah. This alliance, the Wall Street Journal recently noted in a rare acknowledgment of the war’s actual aims, “serve[s] as the main challenge to U.S. and Israeli dominance in the region.” Destroying schools, pharmaceutical plants, factories, and other “things” that allow Iran to function as a nation all serve the decades-old policy of making civilians suffer if their governments challenge US-Israeli dominance.

Unwilling to surrender to the global hegemon and its nuclear-armed outpost in Tel Aviv, Tehran has responded with the limited leverage it has. Defying Trump’s early claims of military victory, Iran continues to strike US assets in the Gulf, fire missiles at Israel, and selectively block the Strait of Hormuz, the transit point for one-fifth of global oil supplies, to widen the economic pain of Trump’s aggression. Earlier today, Iran downed a US fighter jet for the first time, a stark refutation of Trump and Hegseth’s claims that Iranian air defenses are neutralized. Despite talk of an invasion, the current US force posture does not appear sufficient for a ground war. If Trump indeed has no military solution to reopen the Strait, then it appears that he will settle for destroying as much of Iranian society as he can before the political clock runs out on his war of choice.

While Trump also claimed that “regime change was not our goal,” the opposite is the case. As the New York Times reports, the Israeli Mossad went into the war with plans “to galvanize the Iranian opposition — igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government.” Instead, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets to defend their country’s sovereignty. As Air Force Gen. Alexus Gregory Grynkewich, the head of the US European Command, recently noted before Congress: “What I’ve observed over the course of studying air power in history is that any time you attack a civilian population, you usually end up finding that it just hardens their resolve.”

Unfortunately for Iran’s civilian population, a mirror dynamic is at work. When a foreign country resists their aggression, the US and Israel are resolved to achieve state collapse for as long as it takes. In Syria, a far smaller and weaker country than Iran, it took 13 years of CIA-backed insurgency; crippling sanctions; and a plundering US military occupation to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s government. In Iran, the US and Israel are hoping to expedite the process with airstrikes that leave Iran’s economy and institutions in ruins, laying the foundation for social unrest or even a civil war that ultimately ends in regime change.

While Iran’s infrastructure is pulverized, working people in the US and around the world are left to absorb the growing costs of Trump’s wrecking ball. On top of the deprivation from destroyed infrastructure and higher food and energy costs worldwide, Trump is equally indifferent to his own population. Hours before his Iran speech, Trump informed a White House luncheon that it’s “not possible” for the US government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care programs: “We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars.” In fact, he’s destroying another society that stands in the way of US-Israeli dominance, just as in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, and Lebanon.

Two days before Trump’s day care complaint, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a revealing gripe of his own. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” Rubio said. “You’d have a much different country.”

Imagine if Rubio could apply these professed standards to the administration he serves. Moreover, imagine if Trump could merely live up to his own campaign rhetoric since 2015, in which he repeatedly offered an identical critique of the United States. “We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people,” he said on the 2016 campaign trail, when we could have used that money “to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems... Imagine if that money had been spent here at home.”

Now presiding over another war of aggression, Trump has just requested a record $1.5 trillion military budget, a roughly 40% increase to be offset by $73 billion in spending cuts on domestic programs. Trump is spending US wealth on immiserating the people of Iran and millions more worldwide, all while shunning the needs of his own citizens. Along with hurting generations of Iranians, he is ushering in a much different, more dangerous world.